Greenhouse Economics

Value and Ethics

Clive Spash

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415372442
• eBook ISBN: 9781000142853
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: Economic Theory
• Index: Economics

Examining one of the most crucial issues in the modern world: human induced climate change, here Clive Spash provides a refreshing interdisciplinary perspective, pulling together strands of natural science, economics and ethics. Described by John Gowdy as 'the best exposition to date on the political economy of climate policy', this remarkable volume poses serious questions and gives intelligent answers. The issues it addresses are relevant to a range of environmental problems, and it covers themes such as:

• How do we deal with uncertainty and ignorance?
• What roles do science and economics play in policy formation?
• To what extent should individuals take responsibility for the society in which they and their descendants live?

By rigorously examining international and governmental sources, and key contemporary issues, Spash provides an up-to-date and informative analysis. A well-organized study (including a glossary and helpful acronym list), this book will be of strong interest to students and academics in the fields of ecological and environmental economics, and is essential reading for all those to whom climate change is a professional or personal concern.

1 Climate change
Introducing some of the issues

The central concern in this chapter is to provide a broad background picture of the scientific, political and economic issues relating to the enhanced Greenhouse Effect. This initiates the exploration of links between different disciplinary perspectives and some common problems they share. As the structure of the book shows, understanding complex environmental problems requires moving from scientific knowledge of physical relationships and impacts to socio-economic variables in order to comprehend the range of moral dilemmas faced and the limits to human understanding. This will then give insight into the different perspectives and languages being brought to bear on the issue, while allowing the substantive arguments to be identified.

The following pages explore the development of climate change as an international policy concern. Natural science has been at the fore of the debate, but as regulation of various emissions has moved onto the political agenda so economists have entered the debate. Here I begin to identify and describe how human-induced environmental change is linked to economic analysis and introduce themes which are explored in more detail by other chapters. As will be seen, seriously addressing the enhanced Greenhouse Effect challenges the approach to resource allocation of mainstream economics. A range of subjects arise which are relevant to all environmental policy issues: the objectivity of scientific information, asymmetry of costs and benefits over space (regional impacts) and time (intergenerational impacts); risk, uncertainty and ignorance; institutional power over information and policy; and the role of ethical judgement. Each of these areas is a major topic requiring research and posing serious challenges to the current conceptualisation of pollution as a technical problem which requires an engineered solution. Yet, as will be shown in this chapter, similar problems have been and continue to be posed by other pollution externalities. The difference in the case of the enhanced Greenhouse Effect is how the issues confront the analyst simultaneously, are non-separable and on a global scale.

This chapter sketches out some of the issues to be pursued later in the book and gives some context to the enhanced Greenhouse Effect in terms of economic and scientific approaches to pollution. In the next section the connections between developed industrial economies and pollution are drawn out. This is followed by a short introduction to the economic approach to pollution as an externality and critiques of this characterisation. Then the role of scientific knowledge and scientists is given a similar overview. The influence of science in society is a key concern which recurs throughout the book, and particularly the desire for scientific knowledge to be regarded as value free and separable from the political process. How the science of climate change has developed is then introduced in an historical briefing with key information summarised in several tables. A short precursor to some of the ethical concerns which will be raised later is provided before drawing concluding remarks. This introduction aims to provide the context within which the issues concerning the enhanced Greenhouse Effect fall.

Air pollution and the modern economy

The origins of this book lie in the early 1980s when I was working on the impacts of various forms of air pollution on the environment: primarily sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides, as causes of acidic deposition in Europe and North America, and tropospheric ozone smogs resulting from car emissions. These problems provided lessons as to how pollution, and the environment in general, has been treated by business, politicians, academics and the public. They also raised serious questions about the (lack of) interactions between economics and natural science in policy formation. Natural science and socio-economic disciplinary fields largely avoided each other throughout the twentieth century. They also both have a tendency to ignore the political discourse in which they are entwined, wishing to be regarded as offering objective facts free from value judgements, e.g. the desire of the more recent reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to avoid discussing the meaning of ‘dangerous anthropogenic impacts on climate change’ because this is seen as a value judgement and part of the political process.

Perhaps this facade of political immunity is responsible for the dominant approach to pollution problems. For decades this has been to reduce the physical and political presence of pollution without addressing the underlying causes in the way economic and technological systems are being driven. Solutions have been offered and accepted without adequately reflecting upon their own eventual consequences. The environmental engineering and management approach could be summarised as ‘dilution is the solution to pollution’, a philosophy which is still prevalent in many quarters. Thus, pollution and environmental impacts have been transferred back and forth from one medium to another (air, land, oceans) and pushed across jurisdictional and ecosystem boundaries. Readily observable pollution incidents with immediate local damages (e.g. deaths) have been transformed into unobserved, long-term impacts spread internationally. Environmental threats have been transformed from high-frequency low-impact events to low-frequency high-impact events. This historical trend seems set to continue with new forms of ‘pollution’ which have the same economic and political causes but which redefine our understanding of the concept. Thus, the enhanced Greenhouse Effect and genetic bio-engineering can be seen as representing the latest (but undoubtedly far from the last) phases in this progress towards rapid globalisation of human-induced environmental change.

The last century of coal combustion in the UK provides an example. Coal burning for household heating and cooking was responsible for the infamous London smogs through which Sherlock Holmes struggled to find clues, and into which Jack the Ripper disappeared. These ‘pea soup’ smogs were finally brought to an end due to the high number of hospital admissions and deaths being recorded by the newly founded National Health Service in the early 1950s. In particular, during the London smogs of 1952–3, the death toll rose above 4,000, especially affecting the old and those with cardiac and respiratory disorders (Holdgate, 1980: 79). The Clean Air Acts of 1954 and 1962 restricted the zones where coal could be burnt while electricity produced by large coal-fired power stations was increasingly used for heating and cooking. Coal smogs were largely removed, although exceedance of World Health Organisation standards continued to occur in certain areas.

One result of the new power stations was to inject sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxides high into the atmosphere, where they were out of sight and out of mind. That was until the 1970s when Scandinavian scientists began to publicise the link between the changes in their forests and water ecosystems due to acidic deposition. A decade of dispute and research led to the more general acceptance that the long-range transportation of air pollutants from the UK and Germany to Scandinavia was possible, but there was no action by the major emitters. Emissions were given more serious attention by the German government as their own forests began to die and environmentalists began to successfully move into mainstream politics. The main impact on emissions in the UK was due to the changing political and economic fortunes of the coal industry with Conservative administrations determined to break the power of the mining unions. The availability of cheaper natural gas and a move away from heavy industry aided this political agenda. Thus, political and structural change was affecting emissions rather than any concern for environmental damages inflicted on others.

Acidic deposition remains a serious problem which has destroyed and is destroying ecosystems across Europe. In the late 1990s the Scandinavians were forced to issue health warnings against pregnant w...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• 1 Climate change: introducing some of the issues
• 2 Scientific understanding of the enhanced Greenhouse Effect
• 3 Impacts of global climate change
• 4 Weak uncertainty: risk and imperfect information
• 5 Strong uncertainty: ignorance and indeterminacy
• 6 Calculating the cost and benefits of GHG control
• 7 Loading the dice? Values, opinions and ethics
• 8 Dividing time and discounting the future
• 9 Economics, ethics and future generations
• 10 Science, economics and policy
• Glossary
• Index